Or The Fluid Which We Breathe.
Today’s post title owes itself to this find: Josh Wallaert’s new blog, Webster’s Daily, a found poetry project. He writes, “I post one “found poem” every day from the first edition of Webster’s American Dictionary (1828),” and provides an example.
Hope [n.] A sloping plain between ridges of mountains. [Not in use.]
I like his eye for selection. I like
Air, n.
The fluid which we breathe. Air is inodorous, invisible, insipid, colorless, elastic, possessed of gravity, easily moved, rarefied, and condensed.
I like what Annie Dillard says in the author’s note of her book of found poems Mornings Like This:
This is editing at its extreme: writing without composing.
I like this also-relevant part of the book’s epigraph:
I want to use the world rather than my own invention.
–Ellsworth Kelly, The Painter’s Eye
I would like love to stay immersed in these found poems but have to break away. Here (unfairly) are some parts of these poems. And thanks, Josh, for writing and getting me here, from where I have to go, in the first place. (I want to see your documentary.)
I Am Trying to Get at Something Utterly Heartbroken
–V. van Gogh, letters, 1873-1890, edited by I. stone, translated by Johanna van Gogh
A ploughed field with clods of violet earth;
Over all a yellow sky with a yellow sun.
So there is every moment something that moves one intensely.
…
I love so much, so very much, the effect
Of yellow leaves against green trunks.
This is not a thing that I have sought,
But it has come across my path and I have seized it.
——————————————————————–
Class Notes on Painting and the Arts
–Robert Henri, The Art Spirit (compiled by his student, Margery A. Ryerson), 1923
…
THE EYEBROWS
The eyebrows are important. They have great meaning.
They are never without important action.
Be certain of them, their place, direction,
Length, beginning, variation, and end.
The eyebrows are hair in the last instance.
What use wil you make of the eyebrow?
HAIR
Ask yourself, what is your concept
Of the hair. How get its activity?
Let the hair flow amply over the head.
It goes back into richness.
The skull should be firm under the hair.
In hair there should be places of silence.
Look for the occurrence of beautiful measures in the hair.
Things are beautiful because they are related.
LAUGHTER
The laughter should pass
From the beginning of the hair to the end of it.
A ripple runs around and picks up the chin.
When he laughs new forms begin.
After laughter one should feel full,
Not empty as one feels after fireworks.